


Right Guy, Wrong Time

by trixie



Category: One Direction (Band), Radio 1 RPF
Genre: M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 13:11:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2548697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trixie/pseuds/trixie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Bloody hell.”  Nick leans up against the wall behind him, suddenly weak in the knees.  This is completely mad.  Utterly and completely mad and Nick suddenly just wants to leave and go back to bed, skip this day altogether.</p>
<p>Nick stares at the kid for a while and the kid… Harry… frowns back at him.  “OK, if you’re sixteen, what’s the year?”</p>
<p>“2010.”</p>
<p>Nick laughs to keep from getting hysterical.  “Wrong.  It’s 2016.”  He pulls his phone out and thumbs the button to light it up, turns it around to show Harry the date and time.</p>
<p>Harry’s eyes go huge in his face.  “How is that possible?”</p>
<p>“Not a bloody clue.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right Guy, Wrong Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waspabi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waspabi/gifts).



> Thanks to Nick for providing a last minute title for this story. More importantly, many many thanks to Arallara who helped me figure out what I wanted to do with this plot, and who did a last minute beta job when I came up to the wire on the deadline.
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr at [trixiebobixie](http://trixiebobixie.tumblr.com/).

Collette is being bossy at Nick over text.  Which is not particularly unusual on any given day, but she’s being especially shouty in all caps today.

_DO NOT GO BACKWARDS!  STAY STRONG, GRIMMY!_

This is followed by two flexing arm emojis and several hearts.  Nick sends back a blue heart and a kissy face, and puts his phone away before paying his cabbie and getting out.

Nick sighs in relief when no fans appear to be camped out near Harry’s house. He juggles his bags into one hand in order to enter the code Harry’d texted him an hour ago, when he’d let Nick know that the interview they were doing was taking longer than expected and he’d be a bit late.  The code works and he pushes through the heavy gate

He stops at the door and sets down his bags, digging his spare key out of his pocket.  Nick is pleasantly surprised to see that the key he’s had for three years still works.  Harry had said it would, but Nick’s brain is a contrary bastard and had convinced him otherwise.  It’s not really about whether the locks have been changed in the past three years.  They’d never even spent much time here, he and Harry, back in the days when they spent all their free time together.  This house was perpetually under renovation and Harry much preferred to camp out at Nick’s place.  And anyway, it’s been at least two years since he and Harry spent any significant amount of time together anywhere.

He wonders if, with a long touring break stretched out in front of him, if Harry is going to actually start living in this house instead of running off to LA.  And whether that has anything to do with Harry’s sudden invitation for Nick to “come over for lunch and hang out like old times.”

“I want to talk to you about something,” he’d said, refusing to say any more over the phone.

As soon as he opens the door, the alarm system starts beeping loudly and he rushes over to tap the code into the wall panel.  He ducks back out the door to grab the bags and then pushes the door closed with his hip.

“Who are you?”

At the sound of a voice, Nick spins around, squeaks in an unmanly fashion, and drops one of the bags when he’s met with someone standing at the bottom of the stairs, just a few feet away, holding a heavy-looking golf club up like a weapon.  He takes a step forward and the golf club is waved menacingly in his direction.

“Stay there!”

Nick can’t see him very well because he’s standing in the dark stairwell, but he looks young and nervous.  Nick carefully sets down his other bag, thankfully the one with the wine bottle, and raises his hands to placate him.  He also edges backwards towards the security panel just in case he needs to try and hit the panic button.  Walking in on a robbery in progress and getting himself killed is absolutely not in Nick’s plans for the day.

“Where am I?” the kid asks,  “What’s going on?”

“Uh,” Nick says stupidly, because weird questions.  “How about who are you? And what are you doing in my friend’s house?”

“Is your friend a kidnapper?” the kid says, his voice rising in tenor.  He steps forward into the light and Nick is surprised to see a very familiar face.

“What the bleeding hell?  Harry?”  He tries to step forward, but Harry brandishes the golf club at him again, his eyes going even wider.

“Stay back!  How do you know my name?”

Nick rolls his eyes because literally everyone knows his name.  But the thing is, this looks like Harry, but it’s not.  This looks like Harry from five or six years ago.  This looks like a Harry that Nick barely knew, the teenage Harry Styles from X-Factor.  His hair is still a curly brown halo, but it’s cut short and messy in an unintentional way.  His face is round and soft, all big eyes, chubby cheeks, and obscene lips.  He’s several inches shorter than Nick with gangly adolescent limbs hidden under baggy chinos and a baby-blue Abercrombie polo.  Nick thinks this must be a really weird dream or he’s having a psychotic break.

“OK, time to wake up, Grimshaw,” he says to himself and pinches his own arm, slaps his own cheek.  “Maybe it’s a stroke?  How do you know if you’re having a stroke?”  He feels his forehead with the back of his hand, pretty sure that it’s not got anything to do with a stroke, but it’s what his mum always did when he was feeling under the weather, and it’s comforting.  “I’m too young for a nervous break down!”

“You alright there, pal?” the kid, Harry, says.  And god, yes, he sounds just like Harry, mouth full of marbles, Northern vowels and oddly antiquated words like “pal”.

“Heeey, do I know you?” He lowers the club to his side and steps towards Nick, his eyes roving over Nick’s face and body.  “You’re Nick Grimshaw!  From T4, right?  I used to watch you all the time.  Huh, you look older in person.”

“Oh, ta.”

“Look,” Harry says,  “I woke up in this house and I have no idea how I got here or what’s going on.  Last thing I remember, I was at a party at my friend Ethan’s house, and I passed out on a couch in his basement.  And now I’m here.  If the window up there is real, I’m apparently in London?”

Nick nods, because yes, he is very much in London.

“Right.  I was definitely not in London when I went to sleep last night.  So I’m kind of freaking out here, alright?  My mum’s probably mental by now.”  He suddenly looks like he’s about to cry, his eyes big and watery.  He looks away from Nick and sniffs, then wipes at his face.  “I need to call her.  Can you just help me figure out how to get home?”

And Nick’s immediate reaction is to want to go hug him and tut at him, pull him into Nick’s chest and pet his hair.  And that’s not exactly a new impulse when it comes to Harry Styles, but there’s something about it that’s almost too perfect, too calculated and it makes Nick suspicious.  He’s starting to get over the shock of this Harry, and back on sure footing.  He’s suddenly sure this is all an elaborate prank on him.

“Your mum, Anne?”

The kid nods.  ”How d’yo know…”

Nick laughs.  “And you’re Harry Styles, eh?  How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Right.  This is a prank, isn't it?  Greg and Scott somehow talked Haz into setting this up?  Are there cameras or mics set up?”  Nick looks up and around, trying to spot any obvious cameras.  He pokes at the artwork on the wall in the hallway, peers into the large empty vase on the side table.  He’s going to kill them for this.

“Mate, I don't know what you're talking about, but if it’s a prank, it's being played on both of us.  I'd just like to go home now.”

“Home?  In Holmes Chapel, I s’pose, right?  I'm sure you've been very well prepped.”  He reaches out to poke at the kid's face.  “This is the best makeup I've ever seen, I have to hand it to them.  They went all out on this one.”  He grabs the kid’s shirt and pulls it up, and yep, there are Harry’s extra nipples, no tattoos.

The kid slaps his hand away and backs up, tripping over his own feet and sitting down hard on the stairs.  He brings the golf club back up between them.  But everyone and their mother knows about the damn extra nipples, so Nick doesn’t think that proves anything.  Damn Harry and his exhibitionism.

“I’m not pulling a prank on you!  I have no idea what you’re talking about.  My name is Harry Styles and I went to sleep in one place last night and woke up here.  That’s it.  That’s all I know.”

“Hey, drop your trousers.”

“WHAT? No!”  He pushes Nick back with the gold club, and ow, that’s going to leave a bruise.  “Back off, man.”

“OK, alright. Not trying to molest you.”  Nick raises his hands and backs up.  “If you’re really Harry, you have a little scar on the inside of your thigh.”

“How’d you know that?” the kid asks and slaps a hand down over the inside of his left thigh, right under his groin, just in the right place, and that pretty much confirms it for Nick.  He is weirdly attached to that little bit of imperfect skin on Harry’s thigh, has spent time gently biting it while Harry huffed and pushed him away, told him about falling out of a tree when he was 12, and how lucky he was that branch had missed his dick and impaled his thigh. Nick had made a show of kissing it gratefully, making Harry laugh, that time and every time after.  It’s not like Nick has any illusions that plenty of other people haven’t seen the scar, but it hasn’t shown up on the Internet yet, so it’s at least a limited pool of people.

“What’s the scar shaped like?”

“A wonky star.”

“Bloody hell.”  Nick leans up against the wall behind him, suddenly weak in the knees.  This is completely mad.  Utterly and completely mad and Nick suddenly just wants to leave and go back to bed, skip this day altogether.

Nick stares at the kid for a while and the kid… Harry… frowns back at him.  “OK, if you’re sixteen, what’s the year?”

“2010.”

Nick laughs to keep from getting hysterical.  “Wrong.  It’s 2016.”  He pulls his phone out and thumbs the button to light it up, a picture of Olive sticking her tongue out at him from the lock screen, and turns it around to show Harry the date and time. 

Harry’s eyes go huge in his face.  “How is that possible?”

“Not a bloody clue.”

The phone vibrates in his hand and Nick almost drops it in surprise.  It’s a text from Harry.  His Harry.  Well, not his Harry so much as 2016 Harry.  He left his Harry back in 2013.  Or his Harry left him.  Or they left each other.  Whatever, it’s too confusing to figure out, and anyway it’s not the point.

_Finally done.  Shld be out in 15 mins.  Home soon.  xx_

Nick hits call before he really thinks about it.  “Heeeeey,” Harry answers, a grin obvious in his voice, and Nick is incredibly relieved that this grown-up version of Harry still exists.  “Did you get in the house ok?”

“Yeah, fine.  So, hey, you don’t have any younger cousins that look exactly like you or summat?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Simon’s not doing secret boy band cloning experiments, is he?  Building a time travel machine for nefarious purposes in his evil mountaintop lair?”

Harry laughs.  “I don’t think he has an evil mountaintop lair.  Weirdo.  What’s up?”

“You have an unexpected visitor in your house.  Nearly got my brains splattered all over the entry hall.”

“What!  Grimmy, what happened? Did you call the police?  Are you ok?!?  NICK!!”

Nick ignores Harry’s increasingly loud questions and uses his phone to take a picture of teenage Harry, still sitting on the stairs, looking completely lost and scared.  He texts it and says, “Shut up and look.”

After a few seconds of silence, he hears, “Whaaaattt the fuuuuck?”  Which, yeah, his sentiments exactly.  “I’m on my way home,” Harry says, then hangs up.

“Rude.”

Nick sticks his phone back in his pocket and stands there in the hall for a few seconds, trying to figure out what the hell he’s supposed to do now.  Teenage Harry has curled in on himself, elbows on his knees, one hand in his hair.  He’s contemplating his own trainers like they hold the answers to the universe.  Maybe they do for all Nick knows at this point.

“All right,” he says, uncomfortable with all the silence.  “Nothing to do until he gets here.”

He collects his abandoned bags and goes through to the kitchen.  The wine and dessert is fine, but the carrier bag full greek of take out didn’t fare so well.  The slightly smashed Styrofoam containers aren’t too much of a disaster, just some oily leakage from the roast chicken in the bottom of the bag and some stray roasted potatoes.  The sides are intact, and the smaller containers of hummus and dolmas were on top and are untouched.

“I think you dropped this.”  Young Harry comes into the kitchen and sheepishly drops something onto the island.  It’s one of Nick’s bracelets, some silver and black beads he got in Ibiza last year that has a latch with a bad habit of coming undone.  He clasps his hands behind his back.  “Can I help?”

“Nah.  You hungry?”  Nick pushes the small containers towards him.   Harry shrugs but grabs a stuffed grape leaf and stuffs it in his mouth with a small smile.

Nick has to dig around the unfamiliar kitchen to find some tupperware to transfer the chicken and potatoes into, and then he grabs a couple of bottled waters while he’s putting the food in the fridge. He turns around to find that the kid has wandered off into the adjacent lounge and is staring at what Nick referred to as the Wall of 1D when he was last here a few years ago.  Well, shit.

He walks up next to the kid and hands over a water bottle.  “It’s a lot to take in, eh?”

“That’s me.” The kid points to a largish photo of the boys standing outside Wembley arena after boot camp, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning ecstatically and having absolutely no idea what was ahead of them.  The Harry in that picture looks just like this one, his dimples standing out in his chubby cheeks, one arm wrapped around Niall’s neck and the other around Louis’ back, pulling him against Harry.

“And that’s me?”  He points to another photo, this one from a few years ago, the band posing in front of Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, 20 year old Harry now tanned and tattooed, curly hair under a ridiculous Stetson.  He’s still got an arm around Niall, but Liam is grinning and squinting into the sun next to him this time.

“Yup.  That’s you.”  Because what else is he going to say.  It’s a wall full of photos and platinum records, the last six years of Harry Styles’ very public career all laid out for the kid.  “And that.”  Nick points to what is probably the most recent picture on the wall, the lads backstage at the Grammys earlier this year, dressed in smart suits, Sophia and Eleanor and Perrie in fancy dress with the group, Harry standing slightly apart from them, smiling but looking exhausted.  There are lots of other pictures on the wall, personal pictures of milestones in the band’s history, studios and dressing rooms and beaches.  There’s even a picture of Nick on that wall, he and his Harry on his 19th birthday, drunk and grinning at each other.

“So I’m in a band?  Siiiick.”

Nick snorts.  “A pretty big band, yeah.”

“One Direction,”  Harry reads off the platinum records.  “Good name.”

“Well, you named it.”

“Yeah?  So this is actually my house?’’ He looks at Nick and grins, then another picture catches his eye.  “Oh shit, is that Mick Jagger?”

Before Nick can respond, the front door slams open and he hears, “Grimmy!”

He meets Harry in the kitchen and is so fucking relieved to see grown adult Harry Styles standing there in skinny jeans and a soft-looking designer v-neck jumper, bird tattoos and silver necklaces peeking out, long hair back in a ridiculous bun.  He hugs him without even saying hello.

“Hey, Grim,” Harry rumbles against him, hugging him back tightly.  “You ok?”

“I can not deal with this level of weird, Harold.”  He pulls back to look at Harry and that’s when he realizes that Harry did not come in alone, but seems to have brought an entire crowd with him.  “You brought the entourage?”

“I wasn’t alone when you called.”  He rolls his eyes in annoyance and steps away from Nick.  The whole band is here, and a couple of bodyguards, and one lady who looks like she’s from management.  “They insisted.”

“Good to see ya, Grimmy.”  Niall gives Nick a quick hug and Liam gives him the hand-shake/half bro-hug combo, while Louis just nods a greeting.  Zayn seems to have disappeared until everyone hears, “holy shit.” from the other room in Zayn’s distinct voice.

“That would be mini-you.”  They all immediately move into the other room, but Harry just stands there staring at Nick, looking incredibly fond and like he wants to sip some tea and catch up.  “Well, go on.  I’ve done this bit already.”

Nick follows Harry through the crowd until he’s face to face with his younger self, and Nick is suddenly dead sure that this the weirdest thing he’s ever seen in his 32 years.  They just stare at each other blankly for a full minute and then simultaneously, the dimples appear and they’re grinning at each other like idiots.

“Wow,” adult Harry says, just as teenage Harry whispers, “whoa.”

“That’s so fucking weird, innit.  A Mini-Hazza,” Louis says, and Niall says, “It’s creepy.”

“It’s got to be some kind of trick,” Liam adds, leaning forward to squint at the kid.

“I don’t think so,” Harry says, even slower than usual, reaching out to poke his smaller version in the chest as if to make sure he’s real.

“Heeey,” teenage Harry says, and bounces up on his toes.  “I got so tall”

“How do you know he’s really you, Haz?” Zayn asks and Harry just shrugs.

“Just do.”  When everyone continues to look skeptical, Harry asks the kid, “what happened before you ended up here?”

“I was sleeping at Ethan’s house.  He threw this, like, party. His parents were up in Glasgow, and I got drunk and stayed over.  It was kind of a shitty party.”

“I remember that!   You hooked up with Kelsey and she let you, um…”  Harry stops, aware of the crowd around him, but the fingers he”s already help up make it pretty clear to what he is referring.

“Yeah,” mini-Harry blushes.  “But Meg was there too and she was, like, really pissed off at me.”

“And all I really wanted to do was, like, hang out with Kelsey’s older brother, who was home from uni.”

“Um.”  The kid ducks his head and blushes even brighter.  Harry just reaches out and honest-to-god ruffles the kid’s hair with an indulgent smile.

It’s all suddenly more than Nick can handle and he wonders how rude it would be to go break into the vodka that he’s sure is stashed in the freezer.  Eventually, the teen angst reminiscing ends and the introductions start.  Preston, Paddy and the management lady, who’s name is apparently Alice Lynn (both names required), have a lot of questions for the kid, and there is a lot of talk of staying inside, no phone calls, etc.  Nick is bored of it quickly and wanders back into the kitchen to help himself to some pita and hummus.

Once the handlers are satisfied that the kid isn’t a danger to Harry or to the 1D brand or whatever, they take their leave, extracting promises that they will be notified if anything else happens.  Nick isn’t sure what they think is going to happen next, other than maybe the rest of Baby One Direction showing up from the past, but he can’t fault the abundance of caution at this point.

“Right, so,” Nick says, moving toward the door in their wake, “I’ll just leave you all to it.”

“Don’t,” Harry says, a hand landing on Nick’s shoulder, just as the younger Harry grabs hold of Nick’s sleeve and says, “No!”

Nick is completely flabbergasted by the whole thing, but Niall starts laughing loudly.  “Well, that proves they’re the same damn person,” he says and promptly gets kicked by the supposedly grown-up version of Harry.

“Please don’t leave,” Harry says, turning big sincere eyes on Nick that he’s never been able to resist.  Nick sits back down on a bar-stool with a long-suffering sigh, earning him a grin from both Harrys.  Jesus.

“So, how d’ya think this happened?” Liam asks, opening the fridge and grabbing several beers, handing them out to Zayn and Niall, who are closest.  “Like, what made Harry suddenly travel 6 years into the future?” 

Harry leans into Nick and grabs a stuffed grape leaf from the counter.  “You got us greek food?” he asks softly.  Nick nods and pushes the hummus over to him.

“Dunno,” Zayn answers Liam thoughtfully.  “Mini-Haz, did you make a wish in a fountain or some shit?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hey, I heard something about there being a bunch of sunspot activity.  It was messing with cell phones and stuff.  Maybe that’s related?”

“Sunspots?”  Louis says, dripping with disdain.  “Jesus, Payno.”

“Yeah, what’s your theory?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know.”  Louis waves his hand in front of Liam as if to say, don’t care, shut up now.  “The important question is why he’s here and how long he’s staying?”

“No,” Zayn adds, “the important question is how fucked is Harry’s timeline going to be?”

“What?”  Harry looks alarmed.  Nick wasn’t even sure he was paying any attention to the conversation anymore, too busy eating and trying to have a silent conversation with Nick that Nick is completely failing to understand.  “What about my timeline?”

“Well, if he goes back and knows all this stuff about the future, he could make different choices, you know?  It could fuck everything up.  Not just for Harry, but for all of us.”

“I don’t want to fuck anything up!”  Mini-Haz says.  And good god, apparently that name is going to stick.  “My future looks pretty sick.”

“Well, nothing has changed so far, right?” Niall asks.  “He’s already seen the wall in there.”

“At least he can’t accidently date his own mum,” Nick interjects and at Harry’s surprised grin, says, “What?  I have seen some films.  Janey loved _Back to the Future,_ made me watch it loads when I was a kid.”

“Could still change things without knowing it,” Louis says.  “What’s that thing?  Like that movie with Ashton Kutcher”

“The Butterfly Effect,” Zayn answers.

“I don’t think it’s about that,” Harry says, frowning down at the top of the island.  “I don’t think it’s about him. I think it’s more, um. More about me.  Like, maybe I’m supposed to learn something from this.”

“Learn what?”

“Like he’s the Ghost of Christmas Past?” Zayn asks.

“Yeah, like that,” Harry says, looking over at the kid.  “I don’t think it’s about messing with the past.  It’s about future choices.”

“Could be,” Liam nods, looking as serious about the whole thing as Harry.

Everyone is quiet for a minute, apparently contemplating deep philosophical questions, until Niall sets his bottle down on the countertop and breaks the silence.  “Whatever.  The fact is, we have two Harrys for the price of one right now.”

“God help us,” Louis says, and both Harrys predictably say, “heeeey,” making the whole room crack up.

“So, young Harold.”  Louis puts an arm over Mini-Hazza’s shoulders and leads him towards the lounge.  “Tell me more about this legendary party you were at.”

“You heard the whole story,” he answers with a grin and slings his own arm around Louis’ back.  “I want to hear about this band I’m in.  Am I the lead singer?”

The rest of the band follows Louis and Mini-Haz into the lounge, leaving Nick with Harry.  He’s still staring at the marble counter-top like it holds all the answers.  Nick nudges his leg with a knee.  “Hiya.”

“Hey,” Harry says back.  He leans over on the countertop, propped on his elbows and turns his head to look at Nick.  “Sorry our plans got ruined.”

“Eh.” Nick shrugs and smiles at Harry until Harry smiles back.  “The more the merrier.  I didn’t bring enough food for a whole boy band, though, hate to say.”

“They can get their own damn food.”

“So you really think this is all about you learning some kind of lesson?”  Nick asks, taking a drink of his water.  “Kind of ego-centric, innit?”

“Probably.  He showed up in my house, didn’t he?”  Harry rubs at his face and stands up, stretching his back.  “I don’t know, Grimmy.  It just feels that way.  Like it’s time to make some decisions about my future and the universe it trying to tell me something.”

“Ooooh, the universe, popstar?  Really?”

“Shut up,” Harry grins at Nick and grabs his water bottle from him.  “You want something stronger than this?”

“Oh god, yes.”

Harry pulls the bottle of fancy vodka out of the freezer and mixes it with ice and some cran juice from the fridge, handing one glass to Nick and keeping one for himself.  Laughter erupts in the other room and Nick turns to look.  Mini-Haz is at the center of the attention and grinning, the other lads sprawled out around him on the comfortable couches, talking about how the band got together.  Liam is telling some story about a tour bus in Brussels and Niall is laughing and interjecting his own part of the tale.  Zayn is sitting right next to Mini-Haz and poking at his short perky curls in fascination, which just makes the kid smile bigger.  Louis is sitting a little further away, watching the kid like a hawk. The whole scene reminds him so much of many other times he was around the whole band together back in the earlier days.  He hasn’t been around them together for a long time.

“I think they like him more than me,” Harry says, leaning next to him again.  Nick looks over at him to try and read the seriousness of that comment, but Harry’s just smiling fondly at his boys, so he lets it go.

“This is completely mad,” Nick says.  “You know that, right?  Completely stark raving nutters.”

“I have a high tolerance for madness.  Mates with you, aren’t I?”

“Harry!”  Niall yells and waves.  “Get your ass in here and tell Mini-Haz about how you fangirled Mick Jagger.”

“I didn’t fangirl him,” Harry says in the tone of voice that says they’ve had this argument a hundred times.  Harry grabs Nick’s wrist and pulls him along with him into the lounge and Nick goes, because well, that’s what he does with Harry Styles.

Eventually, someone orders pizza and Nick and Harry eat their greek food.  Nick has to defend against his baklava, because Niall is a sneaky bastard, but he manages to keep most of it for himself and Harry.  Someone breaks out the laptop, hooks it up to the big screen and they end up watching a bit of the boys X-Factor appearances and a lot more of their stadium tours. Watching a teenage Harry Styles watch himself being a proper grown up popstar on the big tv screen is a fascinating experience. He starts out poking fun (“Am I wearing a scarf on my head?!”, but it’s not long before he’s watching silently, eyes wide, looking completely stunned. Nick has a lot of sympathy for him, it’s pretty much how he feels about watching Harry onstage.

“I’m pretty good at this, huh?” Mini-Haz asks, turning around to grin at the group. And Nick is reminded again why this band works so well together, because their response is to get on Youtube and find clips of Harry falling over, making stupid faces, felating bananas, and generally being a ridiculous disaster of a human being.

Adult Harry responds to this by pulling up a clip of Liam falling over on stage, and things quickly devolve into a contest to see who can find the most embarrassing footage online. More alcohol is consumed and Nick’s sides end up aching from laughter.

At some point, Mini-Haz sidles up to Nick and grins at him cheekily.  “So you know about my wonky star?”

“Yes?”

“Does that mean you’re my boyfriend or summat?”

Nick chokes on his drink and then laughs nervously.  “No.  Not uh.  We’re good friends.” Nick fiddles with his hair, pushing it up and back. It’s actually been awhile since they could really be called ‘good friends’, but they were definitely never ‘boyfriends’.

“That’s it?” Mini-Haz asks, seeming disappointed at the news.

Nick really has no idea how to respond to that, because there was nothing lesser about their friendship. And it was the complication of sex that had nearly ruined it. Or more accurately, it had been the attempt to have casual sex when they didn’t really feel anything casual about each other. They managed it off and on for a year and a half, but it got harder and harder and when Nick gave up and started actually dating someone else, Harry had reacted badly. He’d apologized later, but it had done real damage to the friendship until last month when Harry called in the middle of the night.

“We had a thing,” Harry interrupts, sitting down on the other side of Nick.  “A while ago.”

“Yeah?” The kid looks really happy and intrigued by this piece of information, leaning closer to Nick with that cheeky grin that he clearly thinks is sexy.  “Did we have a lot of sex?”

Harry reaches across Nick and pushes Mini-Haz away with a hand in his face.  “Leave it.”

Mini-Hax sputters and flails, but leans back in to look intently at Harry. “Do we have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend?”

Nick excuses himself to go upstairs to the loo, because he has no desire to hear that conversation.  He checks his phone on the way back downstairs and sees he has a few texts from Collette.

_How’s it going, Grimmy?  You still there?_

_Has he got you out of your trousers yet?_

Nick huffs in annoyance and sits down on the stairs to respond.  He can’t exactly tell her what’s really going on, so he just sends her a random assortment of emojis, followed by:

_Trousers are on.  Whole band is here.  Weirdest day ever. Talk later._

He’s thinking of following that up with some more emojis, but he hears voices in the kitchen.  There’s a short wall blocking the view into the kitchen, but he can hear them clearly.

“You're being weird,” Harry says.  And it’s definitely grown-up Harry, because his voice is a little deeper and his Chesire accent has been worn down over the years, into something a little more London, a little more American.

“No, I'm not. Your 16 year old self just time-travelled into 2016, who can even say what's weird anymore.”

“Louis.”

“Harry.”

“You know what I mean, Lou. Cut it out.”  Harry sounds annoyed and a little sad.

There’s silence for a few seconds, and Nick imagines they're making faces at each other and having an entire silent conversation, because Nick has seen them do it before.  He suddenly really doesn’t want to be eavesdropping, but if he goes anywhere but back up the stairs, they’ll see him.  The stairs are a bad choice because they have a tendency to be creaky, which is ridiculous for a house that’s been completely renovated, but Harry liked the creaky stairs and had expressly told the builders to leave it.  He’d told Nick the house seemed more alive that way, and at the time it had made Nick laugh, and also want to hug him for a million years.  He was always fondest of Harry when Harry was at his oddest.

“Look,” Louis finally says.  “Don't you want to warn the kid? Like, in case he goes back. Don't you want to tell him. Save him getting hurt, like. Tell him he shouldn't...”

“Shouldn’t what?  Go on X-Factor? Shouldn't fall in love with you? What, Louis?”

“The second one.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“That's stupid. Harry, that's really massively stupid. You got hurt. Why would you want that? Why would you let me do that to you again if you can stop it?”

“You didn't DO anything, Lou.”

“Because I would! If my 18 year old self showed up here, I'd warn him. I'd tell him not to mess around with you no matter how good that attention felt. I'd make him promise not to...”

“Well, I'm glad it's not your mini-me then. You have to get over this. You didn't like, break me, or ruin me, or whatever it is you've built up in that head of yours.” Harry huffs in annoyance.  “Yes, I got hurt. But I have some responsibility for that, you know. It sucked a lot for a while, and then I moved on. I don't regret it. I don't wish it never happened.”

Nick stares down at the now-dark screen of his phone.  Harry has never wanted to talk to Nick about the exact parameters and history of his relationship with Louis.  The only thing Harry had ever said directly was once, early on, before he and Nick were anything more than platonic friends.  He’d called Nick from somewhere in the middle of America, drunk off his ass and alone in a hotel room, trying really hard to pretend he wasn’t homesick.  In amongst the funny tour stories, he’d yawned, sighed and said, “I’m tired of being angry at Louis.”  When Nick asked what Harry was mad about, he’d just mumbled, “should never fall in love with straight boys.”  He’d brushed off any further questions and distracted Nick with a story about the club he and Zayn had gotten into despite their age.  Most of the rest, Nick had pieced together from the things Harry didn’t say over the years.

“That’s stupid,” Louis says again, but he sounds less forceful, more sad.

“Well, I’m stupid.  And it’s not like you were the last person to break my heart, so move on already.”

Louis makes a noise like an annoyed cat and then a breathless grunt and Nick is pretty sure he’s getting aggressively hugged by Harry, whether he wants it or not.

“I wouldn’t change anything. None of it.”  Harry sounds muffled, like he’s talking into Louis shoulder.

“Alright, alright,” Louis says, probably pushing Harry away.  “You’re an idiot, but I love you.  OK?”

“OK.”  Nick can hear that fond grin in Harry’s voice and it’s honestly one of his favorite sounds in the world, even when it’s not aimed at him.

Nick’s a little distracted by it and before he knows it, Louis is standing in the hallway staring at him.  And shit, Nick doesn’t really know what to do, but he’s not about to be intimidated by Louis Tomlinson, so he stares back at him.  Because honestly, at the end of the day, he and Louis have a lot in common:  despite their best efforts, they’ve both hurt and been hurt by Harry bleedin’ Styles.  Louis narrows his eyes at him, and then makes the universal sign for “I’m watching you,” fingers pointing at his eyes then at Nick.  Nick nods and Louis pushes past him and up the stairs, squeezing Nick’s shoulder in solidarity on the way.

Nick stays on the stairs for another two minutes before going into the kitchen.  Harry is standing at the counter and picking at the last of the baklava with his fingers.  Over the afternoon, he’s exchanged his soft sweater for an even softer worn-thin t-shirt and taken his hair out of the elastic band.  He’s barefoot, standing on one leg like a flamingo, the other foot rubbing against the back of his calf, and he suddenly seems so vulnerable to Nick.

If it was two or three years ago, Nick would have gone and wrapped himself around Harry and done his best to make him laugh, but this Harry seems so distant, so untouchable.  He knows that it’s a matter of self-protection.  Harry has spent so much time giving so much of himself to everyone that he’s had to build up this space around himself in order to stay sane. Nick doesn’t really get Harry these days in the same way that he had back when they were doing their thing.  He doesn’t know how to insinuate himself inside the walls, mainly because he never had to before.  Back when they were together, even before the sex, Harry had been a mostly open book to Nick.  He’s not anymore.

“You’re lurking,” Harry says, turning to grin at Nick.

“I wasn’t!”

“Mmm hmm.”  He licks his fingers clean like the shameless menace he is and stands up straight, turning towards Nick.  “The lads are leaving soon.  You going to stay?”

“If you want me to.”

“I do.”

Before Nick can respond with anything more than a nod, Liam and Zayn come in, hands full of empty beer bottles from the lounge, continuing some kind of debate that possibly has to do with time travel, or possibly comic books.

“No, but, like,” Zayn says, dropping his bottles into the recycle bin and waving a hand around, “we could end up with our own multiverse.”

“Right!” Liam nods enthusiastically. “Lots of universes where things happen differently. Like, they put someone else in the group instead of Louis.”

“Or you get put through solo.” They both pause for a second and then Zayn shakes his head. “No, fuck that. It’s too depressing.”

“Hey, nerds!” Niall comes in carrying his phone. “Car’s here.”

While everyone is taking their leave, Nick takes a cigarette he bummed off Zayn earlier and ducks out into the garden.  Harry finds him a while later, comes out and sits down next to him on the bench, passes him the little ashtray Harry keeps out here for his smoker friends.

“What’s your mini-me doing?”

“Pretending he’s not about to fall asleep.”

“Big day for the lad,” Nick says, imitating the kind of hearty jovial voice his dad uses on occasion.  “Finding out he’s a famous popstar and all.”

“Big shock, that.  Really takes it out of ya,” Harry responds in the same voice.  “Growing boy needs his rest.”

They grin at each other for a minute, and Nick feels more comfortable because this Harry, the dorky idiot who shares Nick’s sense of humor, is the one he knows.  Harry stretches his legs out and leans back, crossing his arms over his chest, making himself comfortable.  Nick tries really hard not to stare at Harry’s bicep because it is just not fair to wave that thing around as if Nick has the right to touch.

“So today was kind of insane.”

“Kind of the story of your life, innit,” Nick says, then grins and takes a breath to start singing, but Harry slaps a hand over his mouth.

“Don’t.”

“So what’s going on with you, Harold?”  Nick asks when Harry lets him go.  “What’s all this about decisions for the future?  This band break isn’t really a break-up, is it?”

“No,” Harry says quickly.  “No, we’re ok, mostly.  Just needing some real time off.  It’s going to be a real break, no touring, no recording, no promo stuff, just a proper six months off.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Yeah.”  Harry stares off into the garden for a while.  Nick stays quiet, knowing that sometimes it takes Harry a while to work around to his point. He finishes off the cigarette and stubs it out, moving the ashtray to the ground under him.  Harry doesn’t speak again until Nick leans back to sprawl on the bench next to him.  “The last few months have been pretty shit, you know?”

Nick does know some of it.  Harry had been sick for a good chunk of the last tour, and he’d had a run in with an asshole paparazzi on a few days off in LA, gotten himself filmed cussing at the guy.  It had blown over, but Nick knows how much Harry hates people being angry with him.  He also knows there’ve been other rumors:  Zayn’s broken engagement, slipping ticket sales, arguments with the record label, various side projects.  Nick’s been around enough to know that for as much as rumors can be bullshit, they usually come from somewhere.

“I love my job.  It’s fucking brilliant.  But...”  Harry leans forward, elbows on his knees, and stares down at his hands.  “I was having a hard time sleeping most of this tour.  Got prescribed some pills, but then I started having crazy nightmares.”

The insomnia wasn’t much of a surprise.   It had been a year and a half of only occasional texting and running into each other when Harry was in town, then last month Harry had called Nick out of the blue.  It had been 3:00 am in North Carolina where the boys had just done a show, and he and Harry had chatted for over an hour.  Harry had called again three days later, again in the middle of the night, and a week after that.  It was starting to feel like the good old days. But Harry had never told him about the nightmares.  

“What kind of nightmares?”  Nick gives in to impulse and reaches out, sets a hand on Harry’s lower back, scratches at it lightly, feeling better when Harry leans into it.

“Stupid shit.”  Harry rubs the back of his neck, dropping his head to keep his face hidden behind his hair.  His voice gets quieter, slower. “We all have them, you know?  Niall is afraid of getting trapped, or trampled.  Lou has nightmares about stuff happening to his family.  Liam shows up on stage naked.  Zayn doesn’t talk about his nightmares, but he has them.  I keep dreaming about the fans turning on me, becoming a mob and tearing me apart like in some kind of zombie movie.”

“Jesus, Haz.”

Harry laughs.  “Yeah, it’s not even very interesting.  My biggest fear is people not liking me, it’s hardly a revelation.  But I’m just.  I’m tired.  I need this break, need something just for myself.”

Harry sits up, pushing the hair out of his face, and looks over at Nick.  “I’ve really missed you, Grimmy.”  

“Me too, babe.”  Nick smiles at Harry, unsure of why Harry is telling him this stuff.

Harry stands up and paces across the patio a few feet, pokes at the little autumn flowers in his planter, turns to lean up against the planter wall.  “I had a plan for today.  I had a whole speech about how I’ve grown up, about how I can handle the whole friends with benefits thing better now than I did before.  I was going to give you the speech and try to get you into bed.”

“Harry.”  This was exactly what he was expecting, dreading.  It was what he was absolutely intending to turn down, to politely decline.  Colette had made him promise that he wouldn’t give in and go down that road again.  

“No, wait.”  Harry comes back over and sits down next to Nick, turning to face him.  He has the same stubborn-scared-sincere look on his face as he had at 18 when he’d come to Nick and told him he wanted to try sex with guys, and wanted it to be Nick.  Remembering that look, seeing it again, makes Nick’s chest hurt.  

“The thing is, that was my plan.  But then he showed up.”  Harry points into the house.  “And I don’t know.  I was watching him, you know, and remembering what it was like to want things so much.  I didn’t even really know what I wanted back then, just that I wanted so much it hurt sometimes.  I didn’t know how much all the things I wanted would come with all these compromises.

“Anyway, I was looking at him and I thought, this is fucked.  I don’t want to compromise anymore.  I don’t want to be friends with you, Nick.”  Harry reaches out and curls a hand around Nick’s wrist, and Nick holds his breath.  “I don’t want to just fuck around with you.  I want.  I want to do it proper.  Like, an actual relationship.  I want to be your boyfriend.”

Nick lets out his breath and feels suddenly lightheaded.  

“You can say no, obviously,” Harry says quickly when Nick doesn’t respond immediately.  “I know a lot has changed since before.  And I didn’t handle things very well.  And I know that dating me means dealing with a ton of crap, the tabs and the fans, and all that shit. And I’ve got six months, but then we’ll probably tour again, and it’s…”

“Harry!  Shut up and take a breath, man.”  Nick shakes off Harry’s hand, wraps his own hands around Harry’s biceps and shakes him a little bit. “God, you idiot.  You don’t actually think I’m going to say no, do you?”

“I don’t know, are you?”

“The sad fact of my life, Harry Styles, is that I will probably never say no to you.”

“That’s not sad!”  Harry is grinning at him now and it’s like looking into the sun, so goddamned beautiful that Nick has to squint.  Harry leans into Nick and presses their foreheads together.  “You really want to?” he asks, softer this time, breathy like he’s still unsure of the answer.

“Yeah, I really want to,” Nick answers, because god help him, all the reasons that he should say no, all the reasons that he’s listed to himself and to Collette and Aimee for why he shouldn’t get involved with Harry again, they just don’t matter when Harry looks at him like he hung the actual moon.

“Yay,” Harry whispers against Nick and tilts his head, closing the distance to kiss him.  Nick would make fun of him for it if he didn’t find it so bloody adorable.  The kiss is soft and tentative at first, but Nick is impatient, so he reaches up, puts a hand on either side of Harry’s face and moves him where he wants him, deepens the kiss.  Harry opens up for him, melts against him, and God.  Nick has missed this so bloody much.

They stay there for a long time, making out like teenagers on a garden bench in the damp cool autumn air, and Nick says a silent goodbye to his last shred of self-preservation.  Sitting there on that hard bench, Nick’s hand fisted in Harry’s ridiculous rockstar hair, Harry’s warm hands flat on his back up under Nick’s shirt, he doesn’t care about all the ways it could be a disaster.  Instead, he buries his face against Harry’s neck and thinks about teenage Harry wanting so much it hurt, and lets himself want like that for once.

When the air gets damper, they go inside, stopping to stare at Harry’s teenage version, now sprawled out and snoring on the couch.  He stripped down to his pants at some point and has a blanket that basically only covering one leg.  “Jesus,” Nick says, leaning up against Harry’s back.

“You’re thinking about a Styles sandwich right now, aren’t you?”  Harry whispers and waggles his eyebrows at Nick like an idiot.

Nick makes a completely undignified noise and buries his face in the back of Harry’s neck, because no he wasn’t, thanks, he didn’t need that picture in his head.  “You’re a menace.”

Harry laughs.  “Bet you wish I still had that twink body, though.”

Nick wraps an arm around Harry’s middle, flattens his hand right where he knows that stupid butterfly tattoo sits.  “Nope.  Not even a bit.”  He pushes and gets Harry moving, out of the lounge and up the stairs.

*

Nick wakes up in bed alone, sweaty from the heavy duvet and the sun streaming into Harry’s room.  He climbs out of bed and pulls on a shirt, makes his way downstairs.  He follows the sound of Harry singing softly to himself, snatches of disconnected songs, to find him in the kitchen standing over the coffee maker in nothing but a pair of purple boxer-briefs.

Harry grins when he sees Nick, which turns into a dramatic pout.  “I was going to bring you coffee in bed.”

“You’re too slow, soz.”  Nick makes the pouty face back at him.  “Mini-Haz still asleep?”

Harry shakes his head.  “Nope, he’s gone.”

“Gone?”  Nick goes over and looks into the lounge, and sure enough, the room is empty and the crumpled throw blanket is the only sign he was there.  “Like gone-gone?”

“Alarm would have gone off if he opened a door and he’s not anywhere in the house.”

  
“Huh.”  Nick sits down at the island, puts his chin on his hand.  “Guess he went back where he came from.” 

Harry nods and passes over a cup of coffee, fixed just right.  Shrugs.  “I don’t think we messed up the timeline or summat.  I remember waking up in that basement, hungover and disoriented.  Don’t remember anything else.”  Harry sips at his own tea and frowns off into the distance for a minute.  “No, wait.  I do.”

“Do what?  Remember something?”  

Harry sets his cup down and takes off, out of the kitchen and up the stairs.  “What?”  Nick follows him back up the stairs, at a slower pace to keep from spilling his coffee.  He finds Harry pushing boxes around in the back of his ludicrously large closet.  After a minute of muttering, he gives a little triumphant, “Ha!” and emerges back into the bedroom.

“What are you doing?”

Harry upends a shoe box in the middle of his bed, starts sorting through the pile of what looks like junk.  “My mom packed up some junk from my old bedroom.”  Nick kneels on the bed and pokes at the pile, realizes that it’s some kind of keepsake collection: a cheap frilly garter, a Leeds bracelet, a pair of novelty chopsticks, a shot glass with a dragon on it, some polaroids.  Nick wants to ask about every single thing, but Harry seems to be looking for something specific, so he waits.

“Ah ha!”  Harry holds out his hand with a grin and Nick is baffled to see his own bracelet sitting there, silver and black beads looking a little tarnished and the worse for wear. This was in my pocket when I got home from that party.  I always thought I must have gotten it from someone at the party.”

“It’s mine.”  Nick reaches out and takes it, looks closer, fingers the clasp that would never stay closed.  “I don’t understand.”

“I saw it on the counter yesterday.  I must have… well, he must have taken it.”  Harry scoops up the rest of the stuff and dumps it back into the box, shoving the box off the bed.  “I never knew where that came from.  Always fancied that it was some romantic mystery, like Cinderella’s slipper or summat.  I wore it everywhere for that whole summer.”  Harry shrugs, looking awed and a little embarrassed.

Nick honestly doesn’t know what to do with this information, but if the universe is really giving Harry signs or some sort of cosmic grand gesture, Nick is not about to argue with it.  He reaches out and wraps the bracelet around Harry’s wrist, making sure the clasp is closed.  “Guess you better keep it, then.”

Harry grins at Nick in that way he has, where all the air is sucked out the room and Nick's chest feels tight, and all he can really do is grin right back.  Harry takes Nick’s coffee from him and carefully set it on the side table, then pushes Nick back into the bed and slings a leg over him, settling over Nick’s thighs and staring down at him. 

“I think we should spend the first day of my vacation in bed.”

“Yeah, ok.”  Nick reaches up and hooks a hand around Harry’s neck, pulls him down into a kiss.  “But if the Ghost of Harry Styles Future shows up next, we’re getting the hell out of here.”

Harry laughs and the vibration against his lip tickles.  “Agreed.”

 


End file.
